Mencius Moldbugman

Contextually the story brings to mind many other books and films. The idea of areas of a city lying unknown just out of sight to its residents reminded me of China Mieville’s The City and the City. The avatar-laden virtual world was similar to the 2013 film The Congress.

Without spoiling anything, the plot is a complex story about a man’s relationships with various sexbots and real women in a world where technology has transformed sex into an overly-excessive smorgasbord of fetishes, mutations and glorified onanism. Teledildonics aplenty.

As with the Gig Economy, the author is more concerned with plot and ideas rather than character. The narrator is an anonymous erudite similar to the one in Gig Economy. This is in the Lovecraftian tradition of identical cookie-cutter protagonists who were stand-ins for HP himself

This is both a curse and a blessing. Fans don’t read Lovecraft for the nuanced protagonists but rather for the ideas surrounding them. The same is true here. I can imagine women disliking this story very much due to the lack of relatable characters.

The narrator, like the one in Gig Economy, is a little overly-erudite considering his surroundings. GE had a basement dwelling NEET but one who was capable of quoting Deleuze. Likewise, it’s strange in this world of dazzling technology, AR games and a million distractions...

... to have a narrator who can so readily quote Borges, know obscure Irish pantheists like Scotus Eriugena and possess a Classicist’s knowledge of Greek mythology. It’s satisfying for the intellectually curious reader but more than a touch unbelievable.

If @0x49fa98 ever does write a full-length commercial novel it would be great to see him develop in the area of character depth. However, what his stories lack in character depth they more than make up for it in idea depth. There is just so much here to even attempt to list.

Sexbots, AI Gods, augmented reality taken to extreme, gamification of life, apps for every aspect of your life... I read GSH hoping that any developers weren’t reading it too as I don’t want them to actually bring some of the ideas into reality.